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Mercury Music Prize: The FG Alternative Prize 2011

We don't particularly have anything against the Mercury Music Prize but we thought we'd like to offer our own alternative Mercury 2011 winner. With the actual winner PJ Harvey also in our shortlist, we could well have ended up with the same result. Instead, it came down to the third albums from The Horrors and Wild Beasts. Three is a magic number?
Simon wrote a nice analysis of PJ Harvey's Mercury victory but we won't be having any such analysis here really. I simply asked the other writers which were there favourite albums from the shortlist. And we also had a few special mentions from a variety of genres - Bring Me To The Horizon, Mount Kimbie, Yuck, James Blake and Robert Plant to name but a few.

Ultimately though, it very much came down to a battle between The Horrors and Wild Beasts - aside from myself and Simon, who chose Bayonets - the former two bands dominated everyone's choices. In the end, the winner proved to be....

So congratulations to the band for this minor accolade. But congratulations to all the bands that made our shortlist - you've each made albums that at least one of us really enjoyed - a triumph in itself. In particular, Talons, Devil Sold His Soul and Arctic Monkeys, who each featured highly in our individual choices.